The Pub Discussion Board

For those of you who didn't happen to see the messages over the weekend, sometime in the dark hours of Oct. 10-11, some scumbag or scumbags unknown managed to hack into an administrator account here at The Pub.  What they thought they might actually get out of that, I don't know.  I guess some people just aren't happy unless they're causing harm to someone else.

What they did was to attempt to delete all the stories and all the forum posts from the site.  Access logs show they tried to get to the database directly, but weren't able to, so they used the administrator scripts on the site to accomplish these actions.

Please note:  User passwords are stored encrypted in the database.  Even if they had managed to get there, they would have had to do quite a bit of work to figure out what your password was.  And, of course, we keep no truly sensitive data here, so your privacy is as secure as it was before.

Now, you'll note I said they attempted to delete all the stories and forum posts.  They weren't quite successful, due to the way my scripts work.  I was able to recover all of the stories, and they have been put back in place.  If you find anything out of order in the stories, let me know, so I can fix it as quickly as possible.

I was not able to restore all the forum posts.  The forum is not my code, and so the scripts weren't as "sneaky" as my story scripts.  What I was able to do was to restore posts up to early 2013, from an old backup copy I had on my hard drive.  (Yes, here's my mea culpa:  I had not been making regular backups.  I had believed that GoDaddy was doing this in case of emergency, but they are not.  This is an issue that I have already corrected.)

The forum is not entirely fixed.  There will be stories whose forum topics are missing or in the wrong place.  If you happen to find one of these, please tell me, and I'll get it fixed when I have a chance.  (Forum posts are just not as important to me as stories are.)

While I really can't fathom what joy these bastards got out of hurting others, we have luckily only suffered a major wound, instead of a mortal blow.

Regards,
Eric Storm